Review: NIGHT CITY, Southwark Playhouse

At first glance, Night City appears like your classic boy meets girl – specifically, rideshare driver meets waitress, and takes her to see the dinosaurs at Crystal Palace in the morning light. What emerges from these foundations, however, is an unflinching love letter to London, and a candid illustration of the lives of the gig workers who keep it afloat.

Our leads Jack (Jack Ambrose) and Tia (Bex Smith) occupy opposing poles of the spectrum of attitudes towards their profession, inspired by writer Max Wilkinson’s own experiences working odd jobs alongside his writing. Cocksure Jack is eager to make ends meet at all costs, even if it means exploiting other drivers, while Tia romanticises shift work and spends her spare time writing her novel memorialising life in the capital.

The narrative beats in the play, these characters’ ups and downs, are all derived from the nature of their work – failed unionisation, undeserved firings, evictions. This evolves into an all-too-believable tale of corporate conspiracy that ensnares Jack and places him in a Faustian dilemma. There are some references to the Employment Rights Act, which banned zero-hour contracts in December last year, to help us understand the political forces at play, but the real political strength of this show is in its seamless marriage of policy and its impact on people’s actual lives.

As a gentler, more life-affirming tonic to what could have been a very bleak play, we also follow adult social carer Tamara (Helena Pipe), and the amusing clash of lifestyles that occurs when she’s assigned to care for a wealthy older woman living in Camberwell. Nonetheless, Wilkinson does not shy away from the realities of Tamara’s situation – the firm she works for is on the point of privatisation, minimising her time with patients and putting them at further risk.

This is a lot to fit in to a 90-minute runtime, and the fact that Night City’s narrative cohesion does not totally fall apart is a credit to its hardworking stars, who each play a diverse cast of characters beyond the three principals. The effect is unrelenting, an image of a modern city where people’s lives run at breakneck pace and often bleed into one.

Olivia Jamieson’s set, and Arnim Friess’ lighting and video design, are immersive without ever being distracting. Characters weave in and out of chains hanging from the ceiling, as flashes of light highlight the divisions and shifting power dynamics between them. Rose Ryan’s movement direction lends an elegance to the abrupt transitions between episodes, but also has a violence to it; characters don’t merely dance, but attack, chase, run away from each other.

Wilkinson’s writing is at its strongest when it takes on a poetic quality, seeing the harsh beauty in London at night on the way home from a shift. Sometimes this is at the expense of plot; after a delicately executed image of snow on the Old Kent Road in the wake of tragedy, we have a clumsily inserted courtroom scene that reads too much like an attempt to hurriedly tie the three characters’ narratives together with a neat bow.

It is a shame to leave this play on a note of such little ambiguity – much of the appeal of these characters, and the power of Night City’s political message, lies in the instability of their fates.

Night City plays at Southwark Playhouse until 3 October

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